Maple teethers

I wanted to make a teether for my son, so I whipped this up today from a scrap piece of maple. I made a second one for a neighbour’s boy of the same age. No finish, but a lot of sanding, raising grain with water and re-sanding.

I ended up hand-sanding the corners to round them sufficiently. I’d rounded the pieces generally with the router, but the corners ended up pretty sharp. The belt sander was too aggressive in taking off material.

I have to laugh at you “raising the grain” as there will be plenty of that going on in use. If you want to make it really interesting for them make the teethers out of a checkerboard of dark and light woods, they’ll stare at it for hours. Good way to introduce them to the craft. Measure nothing, cut many times!gene

Thanks Sharad; I’m not sure. I think I have seen them made of cherry as well, but mostly the ones I’ve seen online have been maple.

Last night my son discovered that the teether is also excellent for banging on other toys; then he got it stuck on a protrusion on the other toy and had to figure out how to get it off. An all-around learning tool!

I don’t remember offhand, but the holes are 1 1/2 diameter. The width is whatever the scrap was that I had lying around – I think it was a little over 2 1/2 inches – and I cut them to length after drilling the second hole, just eyeballing to get roughly the same distance between hole and edge on each end.

Elizabeth, thank you for this post. My wife is pregnant and I’ll be adding this to the list of baby projects to make. Great idea! My wife watched a documentary on plastics a couple months back and now she wants to try and avoid as many plastic toys as possible for our baby when its still teething. Lol, hey, more projects for me so I dont mind. Thanks again and great idea. I like vipond33’s suggestion as well.

Interesting about the plastics Gene. I found out a while back that the wooden teethers are probably better than most through a thread here on LJ. I asked a parent/child educator that deals with these things in her teaching. She said as long as it is BPA-free, then the plastic is considered safe. I did some googling and found What is BPA? Should I be worried about it??

He hasn’t played with it much, actually. Not terribly keen on teethers in general. I think I would have made it a little thinner (but the scrap was too short for my planer), as long as it wasn’t so thin that it might crack if someone stepped on it the wrong way.